Interview with Elly Cho
Elly Cho has exhibited around the world and holds numerous awards. Her art explores the intersection between nature, the environment and human behaviour across various mediums, including mixed media, video and performance art.
How would you describe yourself and your artwork?
I have been living both in Seoul and the countryside of Jeju Island, which is near Seoul. I had been experiencing the untouched nature from a young age in Jeju island, which influenced my artwork quite a lot. My core subject matter is nature and its means to our life which I experiment in various ways to raise awareness of nature and the preciousness of species on our planet. After living in Jeju Island and Seoul, I moved to Switzerland, highlighting the untouched wilderness in the never-ending mountains that inspired me to the core. I also have a vacation apartment in Phuket, which inspired me for both my paintings and video works. In my artistic career, from the jungle in Thailand to the mountains in Switzerland, I experienced various landscapes. I could adapt nature and its form into my artworks. and suggest a way of ability
I approach the subject matter of cultural landscapes in narrative form, and these narratives often relate to my own life experiences and memories. I have used familiar landscapes that stimulate viewers to engage with an imaginative response in my video work. And through diverse media and various types of installations, I seek to transport viewers into an imaginary yet grounded in reality, exploring the relationships between nature, people, and the mundane.
A sense informs my art of the atmospheric, which aims to create an ambience within the viewer’s perception and the natural, which reflects the surrounding environment. The projects I have pursued seek to provoke the viewer’s imagination to connect their personal history with the broader cultural landscape. And the approach that I employ encourages the viewer to revisit critical historical moments in a dream-like context of memory and artistic representation.
Drawing my ideas from fiction and reality, I combine existing and imagined personal memories addressing nature, the environment, and its means in our lives. My artist reference range from painters O'Keeffe, peter Doig, Laure Prouvost to Odilon Redon. And video artists Bill Viola and Yang Fudong depicting a collage of feelings from heart and reminiscing of my paintings.
How do you go about beginning a new piece? Do you have an idea already in mind, or do you start working with materials or sketches to find the departure point?
In the case of painting, I start withdrawing on a paper or doing a small piece first and then move on to a big image. I experiment with my ideas going back and forth between taking a chance and planning my drawings with lines on a picture plane. In the video case, I start with planning a team meeting with the director of photography first before preparing the final ideas. I hire actors, dancers, and singers for the performance piece, often using a video piece with the performance; I plan the whole article as a video and a performance piece. In both paintings and video pieces, I already have an image in my head using materials before even starting the work. It feels novel to have this ability.
A place to land(no4), acrylic on paper, 2021
When do you think your most prolific time of day or week is?
The most prolific time of the day would be early afternoon for me. I begin researching the piece I will be working on in the morning. It usually takes a few days or just a day. It depends on the complication of the project I am working on. I like planning my day, week or even months for my work schedule. Often, I have a hard time doing two, so I start with drawings and then plan the piece one medium at a kind of media simultaneously time.
What is a barrier you as an artist overcame? Is there anything that enabled you to develop your work as an artist in your life?
I had been struggling with time management. Since I deal with various genres in my artworks, each genre needs time to develop into a finished work. For example, when I started a performance piece for the first time a few years ago, it took me almost a year to finish the report, including a place to perform the work.
Even for the video pieces, I make a series of work within the same project, and it takes time to develop, so I have less time for paintings. For ten years between 2009 and 2019, I had a hard time doing paintings because of my video projects and residencies concentrating on video works.
Did you have an idea of what you wanted to create right from the beginning?
This question deals with the same subject as question No.2. I think it depends on the project I am working on. For the paintings, I think I experiment with materials, but at the same time, I also know what direction it will end up in a way that I have a plan of the process in my head. There are projects that I need time to research before I start working on them, which includes a lot of reading philosophy books. I recently researched my performance project and had to read Gille Deleuze
The performance project entitled Sounds of Fragment: Ecological Dreams, which was for the Gyeungggi Media art festival at the Nam June Paik art centre, was about how humans can sustainably live with AI/machines. Often people are scared of AI, but it is used widely in business and personal life more than ever. I wanted to bring this subject to raise awareness of AI not being dangerous. It is not in the stage of threatening anything and will not be better than human people’s job o because it lacks cognition. Feelings are a privilege that humans are attached to. As our science fiction (sci-fi) movies love to portray Artificial Intelligence as the bane of human existence and something that will take over the entire world, it is intriguing to look at this aspect of AI that is yet to be uncovered. While deep learning and artificial neural networks have evolved through the years, they are only biologically inspired by the human brain. It is significant to note that artificial neural networks are not and probably will never be a permanent replacement for our human brain. I play around with these ideas of human existence and AI’s role in our life.
Sounds of Fragment: Ecological Dreams, performance view
Voice performance and single channel video, 8 channel sound, 20minutes, Nam June Paik art center, Gyeonggi media performance festival, November 18, 2017
What is the meaning or creative inspiration for your work? We’re curious what the narrative or story you are producing?
I feel that my inspiration will always be slightly different each time, but the core subject about nature and the preciousness of the species in this world will always inspire me in my work.
My video piece Island depicts life on an Island. I Use the island as a metaphor for life, the Repeated daily life routine but at the same time Island as a cross concept of reality and fantasy, the daily routine in a state of fiction and reality. I leave the viewer with questions to reflect on their everyday life or life in a pandemic. While my recent performance project dealt with human existence and the question bout co-exitance with other species, my painting project currently deals with the pure joy of beauty found in various species on our planet. Also, it deals with fantasy like composition, which comes from simplifying design and reducing all unessential elements. By doing this and through my obliquely structured documents, it focuses on pure vivid colour and the movement of the species I am painting. When I used to go back and force from Island to the city in my childhood, I experienced untouched nature surrounded by the ocean and the forests because of my father's business. Still, at the same time, I felt urged to protect these creatures on the island from the destruction when I became an artist. And the species living in nature-inspired me to formulate my feelings to oppose the demolition.
The stories in my work vary, but for example, my video work entitled Eclipse: Recognized by the sound is about childhood that becomes fragments of imagery that compose the story's development of my memories of growing up. I grew up travelling back and forth between the urban space of Seoul and the natural environment of Jeju Island. My memories and feelings behind these experiences are expressed by traversing over the temporal boundaries of the present and past and the line between reality and illusion. My younger brother was hospitalised because of pneumonia and died suddenly and unexpectedly because of a medical accident on the Eclipse in 1999. She was in London at the time. I tell the story of my childhood in the format of video art, with fragments of my memories turned into the scenes that compose the movie. In this video, art, sounds and music become pivotal points around the various conflicts the girl experiences. Audiences sympathise with the major and minor conflicts the girl experiences through multiple types of music and sound found in nature.
The Eclipse: Recognized by the Sound (Trailer), Three Channel Video, 2015, 02:54 (Original length of video, 14:10)
The Eclipse: Recognized by the Sound (Trailer), Three Channel Video, 2015, 02:54 (Original length of video, 14:10)
The Eclipse: Recognized by the Sound (Trailer), Three Channel Video, 2015, 02:54 (Original length of video, 14:10)
Besides your artworks, are there any other things in life that your voice as an artist may consider vital or valuable? What makes you joyful and creative, in other words?
I value the exitance of all species in our world. We should love them in a way that we value ourselves. Often people forget about it and remotely live life. I try to remind those factors in my work continuedly with various media. Depending on the project, there are better media to express or communicate with the viewer, and I try to use the best possible way to communicate with the viewer in my work. I love creating art. It is a joy of my life, but at the same time, I enjoy the process of creating an artwork, whether from my memories or a book inspiration. I am gifted with this storm of ideas swearing in my head every day and try to put it in art.
It feels as though creating art became a profession and my hobby. I am 24 hours thinking about my work, and often it is tiring, but at the same time, I become very much into the subject matter that I am working on. The joy of discovery while thinking about the possibilities of conveying what I am trying to create is a great pleasure for me. I find myself in nature while deciding the concept and structure of the piece. The research about the history and the problems it faces because of destructions and species in various places, inspiration rises from the big ideas and develops into a focusing on my connection to nature the how we can protect this beauty of origin that lies in spaces we pass by every day, problems solving in a visual sense, sometimes concentrating on a small scale of the crisis and making it to more critical problem-solving questions to reflect on. It becomes the concept of the truth we face to nature, the myth of where we come from, going back to basic in terms of time and space.
Are there any exhibitions or places where people can see these beautiful creations in person soon? Anything on the horizon?
I hope to complete the installation plans for the upcoming group show at the Suuny Art Centre for the Suuny Art prize shortlisted artists exhibition in London in February 2022. I am excited to take part in this honourable exhibition. I feel that getting an award in this kind of exhibition is not essential but taking part in it and getting feedback from the audiences are more valuable. Of course, it will be great if I am chosen for the prize, and that will add up to a practical experience to make better artworks in the future. I am also planning to have a solo show in the coming year or the next. I would like to have paintings as well as videos in this exhibition. These works are about nature and the disturbance we face because of climate change. I am working on a series of paintings and video works that depict species' exitance and the value of their species on lives seen on our planet. I considered certain visual metaphors. Compared with the eternity of the universe, human life is short, very short. Our existence is like a grain of sand in a desert or a speck of stone on the rock that makes the world. Conflict and destruction seem absurd if you consider the insignificance of our time on earth. Let us distance ourselves from oppression and slaughter. The creation of world peace is more important for all humankind. Human life is not always beautiful; more often than not, we are simply trying to survive, allowing our lives to continue and nothing more. I depict the beauty of species on our planet and, at the same time, the visual metaphor, which I see as a value in their existence and the co-existence with humans.
The artwork exhibited at the Sunny Art Centre is as below.
Visual biomimetics: A State of Art (No.1) ,2021, teaser, video animation, 2 minutes 30 seconds
Visual biomimetics: A State of Art (No.1) ,2021, teaser, video animation, 2 minutes 30 seconds
The tang of ozone flower, 34 cm diameter,oil on wood board
